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What really happens in chambers: Anatomy of Litigation 101 (reader blog)
They say if you want to die of poverty, struggling to make ends meet, with no money and even less of a reputation, then choose your profession wisely because there are very few professions which can make you into an irritating, socially ridiculed, annoying destitute as law.{jcomments off}
“Better late than never” will hopefully be apt and accepted here: Legally India is pleased to finally announce the talented, witty and insightful winners from more than 12 months of our rolling blogging competition. We know you’ll enjoy these fantastic reads!
The Indian legal blogging scene has exploded since Legally India held its first blogging competition in 2010. To celebrate and continue encouraging top Indian legal blogging, LI is now hosting the second blogging competition for readers’ and Indian legal bloggers’ enrichment. The rules are simple: every month, if all goes well, the best blogger will win Rs 3,500.
Legally India editor Kian Ganz will now blog regularly in The Lawyer magazine’s new blogs section about the Indian legal landscape. Here is the first post.
By far the personal question that I get asked the most by lawyers in India and abroad is: “Why India?” You might want to ask A&O, CC, Links or Freshfields or the rest of the pack the same question.
Finally after many, many requests Legally India is now ready to offer internships to law students.
It is time: the public and judges have spoken and determined the four best blawgers in India to win Rs 65,000, the best blog posts of seven months of the Legally India blogging competition and the special prize of Rs 20,000 for the best post on social justice. Click through to find out – again, it was a very tight call.
The final leg is here to decide on who can rightfully wear the crown of India’s best legal blogger. You will also decide on who has written the single best blog post of the lot, as well as the special prize for the best blogging tackling issues of social and legal importance. These categories are the big ones, with almost Rs 1 lakh of prizes remaining to be divvied up.
The public and the three judges have spoken and decided on the most entertaining, the most useful and the most well-written blog posts in the second round of the Legally India blogging competition. Click through to find out the winners in what was an even harder choice in most categories than the first round.
The penultimate stage of voting for the best Indian legal bloggers starts now: rebrowse and decide on the funniest blog post, the most useful blog post and the best written blogs. These categories again promise to be a tough but thoroughly entertaining contest.
A total of 153 unique public votes are in and tallied and three judges have pored over the entries to determine the best student and qualified lawyer blogs written in the Legally India blogging competition. Congratulations to the clear run-away winner in each of the categories.
The time has arrived for you to choose your favourite bloggers and re-experience your favourite posts. We start out this week with what will be a hideously tough challenge for the best single posts on life as a qualified lawyer and life as a law student. Get stuck in!
For almost six months Legally India's law bloggers have surprised, educated, entertained, assisted, exposed and stretched the minds of this site's readers beyond everyone's wildest expectations. We now look at some of the best quality legal writing and writers in that half year, in the run-up to the final month of the Rs 1.2 lakh blogging competition.
The Mumbai Mirror wrote about a gentleman this week who is "probably city's oldest law student" at 80 years of age. If so, he is lucky to have slipped through the age-barrier net that has been woven by the Bar Council of India (BCI).
Uddhav Alkari (not pictured) is an ex-employee of Madhya Pradesh State Secondary Education Board and the father of three children. According to tabloid Mumbai Mirror, he waited until his children were well settled to follow his dream of studying law.
He has had a tough time getting there, even without the BCI rules, as his 1967 exam scores were too low for law school admission and he had to get to law school in a round-about way.
In any case, hearty congratulations to Mr Alkari for his efforts and achievement.
However, despite most BCI members probably being of the same generation as Alkari, the body would probably not be pleased for him.
The Bar Council of India, Rules of Education, 2008 schedule III clause 28 stipulates that general category students seeking admission for BA (law) courses should not be above 20 while the age limit for the reserved category is 22 years.
The candidates for post-graduation course (LLB), in the general category should not be over 30 while for the reserved category the age limit is 35.
The Law Commission of India led by chairman A R Lakshmanan had also endorsed this rule.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court recently stayed all further proceedings in 12 High Courts on petitions challenging the Bar Council of India Rule fixing upper age limit for admission to LLB.
Delhi University Faculty of Law alumni Shilpi Gupta had studied with much older classmates and believes there is some value in the new BCI rule.
"A majority of students in our class belonged to the age group of 30 and above," she tells Legally India, "consisting of working professionals who were not interested in serious pursuit of law as a career, but rather hoped for advancement in their established fields."
"Therefore, BCI's mandate on imposing maximum age limit for admission to a law school is a welcome step. It will ensure that more seats are available for younger candidates for whom law is a preferred career option and not a tool for value addition."
Photo by Sukanto Debnath
The Bar Council of India (BCI) is displeased about plans to take away legal education from its ambit by the ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD).
Confounding expectations Press Notes 2 and 4 will stay as they are, according to a press report this morning. Perhaps a few lawyers will not have been surprised, however.
"There is no plan to make any changes in Press Note 2 and 4 at all," an unnamed "senior finance ministry official" told the Indian daily Business Standard.
Upsetting for some - Indian lawyers have complained for months now about the grey areas in Press Notes 2, 3 and 4 that were feared (or hoped) to allow foreign direct investment (FDI) through a backdoor route.
"I am surprised that such statements are being given," said one Mumbai-based corporate partner, who added that Press Note 4 governing downstream investment and ownership and control issues needed some work done. "We were quite sure that there would be something which would clearly clarify things and not leave anything to interpretation."
On the other hand, for several months now Legally India had heard off-the-record murmurings from a small handful of lawyers that they did not think the Finance Ministry would revise the Press Notes.
Did they know something that journalists and other lawyers didn't?
Pressure from Bharti, MTN and their advisers could have also swung the mood, as both the companies and the Government hope to seal the biggest cross-border M&A deal in India's history, which will rely on the Press Notes in its complex structuring.
And Pantaloon Retail too – whose current legal advisers Legally India has unsuccessfully been trying to confirm for ages – embarked on the first steps to an ambitious restructuring to increase foreign investment stakes in reliance on Press Notes 2 and 3.
An seemingly gutsy move at the time but perhaps Pantaloon and its advisers too knew something others did not, despite the restructuring having now apparently been put on hold.
Many law firms would probably pay consultants an arm and a leg for this advice. Inspired by FoxMandal Delhi's recent cash flow woes, regular Legally India commenter Legal Dodo posted an interesting list for law firms to save money. For free!
While Legal Dodo is happy to admit that some of these points are obvious and may not necessarily apply to every law firm, his/her points are nevertheless worth thinking about:
"Here are some random thoughts/tips on cost cutting. They are in no particular order of priority and may not necessarily apply in every situation. Some of them are borne out of experience. Of course - some are very obvious.
1) Assess all the infrastructure you are using - especially the real property. Do you own excess space? Have you leased excess space? If yes, ensure that all your staff work together. Keep the excess space unoccupied. This helps save electricity costs. If you use air-conditioning - believe me - the savings can be substantial.
2) In case you are paying an above average rent for the space you are
occupying, negotiate with your landlord for a downward revision of the rent. After the recent global meltdown, there are hundreds of office spaces lying vacant.
Your landlord will be put on the defensive and is likely to accede to your request, especially if you threaten to vacate.
3) Alternatively, negotiate for a right to sub-let. If you have excess space and your growth plans are not as aggressive as they were when you first leased your office space, short-term sub-letting makes a lot of sense.
4) Is your office located on a main road in a prime business location? If yes - then reconsider whether it makes sense continuing from there. For a law firm, such a location offers little advantage. Consider shifting into a suburb or into an office off the main road. Rents are considerably lesser in these areas. Perhaps, your staff's efficiency may also increase.
4) Do you have multiple telephone connections (landlines) or multiple
Internet connections? If so, it makes sense to cut down on them.
5) If your office has good ventilation and natural lighting, consider making optimum use of the natural air and light. This could help cut down your electricity consumption.
6) Cut down on your marketing and promotional spending. Avoid sponsoring seminars, conferences, moot-courts, local-events and/or business-round-tables.
In my experience, these are a colossal waste of time and money.
7) Similarly, stop attending such seminars, conferences or other events, especially if you have to pay through your nose for it. If you are invited, and do not want to miss out on the networking opportunity, offer to speak at the conference. Often, organizers are short of speakers. If so, they will be more than happy to
get a free speaker and perhaps may also give you a few free delegate passes, which you can share with your colleagues.
8) Avoid wasteful travel. If you have to travel, then do so and stay economically. Staying in five star hotels and commuting in expensive chauffeur driven cars burn a significant hole in your pocket. You can stay just as comfortably in good service apartments and save on transport by using city taxi. Avoid overnight stay, if possible.
9) Avoid expensive lunches/outings and/or throwing lavish parties.
10) Cut down on the freebies that you give to your staff. Do they have free telephones? Are they provided with expensive cars? Impose a limit on their telephone usage. Consider car pooling for the staff.
11) Cut down on your excess security and maintenance staff. Keep the minimum staff required to ensure security and cleanliness of the office. Invariably, these employees are sourced from a security or house keeping agency. Therefore, you are not firing anyone, and even better, they are not losing their jobs when you relieve the security and maintenance personnel of their duties.
12) Cut down on unnecessary subscriptions, especially foreign publications.
13) Hire interns, instead of fresh employees, for doing routine work or carrying out support functions.
14) Use Skype or e-mail to communicate and reduce telephone costs. Reduce stationary usage by printing only if you have to. Use both sides of paper while printing. For rough drafts, you can use the printer option to print multiple pages per sheet.
15) Cut down on giving corporate gifts.
16) Use the courier service only for important documents. For routine mails, use the postal service. It's much cheaper.
17) This is the most contentious point. Chop dead wood. In other words, identify the non performing staff and encourage them to leave. Almost every organization lands up making hiring mistakes and taking on people whom it should never have hired. Employees with an "entitlement culture," i.e. those who cannot look beyond their own nose, are the worst people to have around at any time, more so during an economic crisis. Such employees shirk work, avoid responsibility and mysteriously develop high fever or a severe tummy ache whenever a complex assignment crops up. They stop looking for work the moment they are employed.
Once employed, they are the first to approach the HR Department to ascertain how many sick leaves, casual leaves, paid leaves and national holidays they are entitled to. They expect hefty pay hikes every six months and fudge their time/work records to show how well they are performing. While at "work," they spend time chatting, surfing the net, taking long coffee and smoking breaks and complain about just anything they can complain about. Invariably, whatever little work they do requires to be entirely redone. Such employees are a big nuisance and extremely demoralizing to have around. It's a big mistake to consider them as "family" and put up with them. Invariably, they go around bad-mouthing the organization at every given opportunity. Such employees are perhaps the greatest liability any organization can have, especially a service oriented organization like a law firm, whose human capital is its greatest asset. It's wise to be diplomatic while doing away with such employees. Give them glowing recommendation letters, if necessary. Words are free. Won't you be glad that your worst performer lands up joining your rival?
As I mentioned earlier, these are just random thoughts. Constructive criticism welcome. Feel free to add to the list.
Legal Dodo."
And as requested, I'd like to add a couple of extra points to this very comprehensive list:
18) Institute reasonable pay-cuts. A lot less painful that outright lay-offs and a sensible option for unsustainable salaries that were pegged after blind competition in a boom market.
19) Introduce a part-time working option for employees who are interested for personal or other reasons. Someone on a four-day week will save a firm 20 per cent and if the employee is good they could end up managing their time more efficiently than a full-time employee. On the flipside, it can be a headache to manage from an HR and client service-level perspective.
20) Consider outsourcing your back-office operations (which is perhaps my most contentious point). Clifford Chance, for example, was targeting £8m (around Rs 60 crore) annual cost savings with its offshoring of document production (and now also paralegal fee-earners) to Gurgaon.
Please do add your ideas, suggestions and comments.
Good news: no lawyers were laid off in US Biglaw last week - the first time since records began (this year). But how have Indian lawyers fared in the downturn?
US blawg Abovethelaw.com teamed up with fellow blawgers Lawshucks to produce a beautiful graph of number of lawyers retrenched versus time.
And lo-and-behold, a trend is clearly visible - lay-offs spiked heavily in March, then began dropping off gradually until this week, when for the first time this year all US lawyers apparently held on to their jobs.
Although the US economy and lawyers are unlikely to be out of the woods yet completely - almost 600 US lawyers still lost their jobs in July and the country overall saw an increase in initial jobless claims to 558,000 last week.
Nevertheless, in the US and UK, lawyers' jobs were amongst the first professions to get hit by the downturn, exhibiting as they do exposure and sensitivity to many sectors.
This could also mean they will be at the vanguard of the recovery.
In India, by contrast, retrenchment has often been talked about in hushed tones with many firms denying any took place whatsoever.
What has been your experience?
Will limited liability partnerships (LLPs) actually work, asks Indian Corporate Law Blog, notwithstanding the recent tax changes.
Lead blawger V Umakanth uncovered an interesting academic paper analysising what the Limited Liability Partnership Act could actually mean in practice for lawyers.
One possible conclusion is that, hindered by the Indian Companies Act 1956, it in fact won't do anything to alleviate one of the main reasons for law firms to turn LLP in the first place: breaking through the technical 20 partner limit.
A commenter disagrees with the analysis and writes that the Indian Companies Act's section 11 provides "a carve out for associations 'formed in pursuance of some other Indian law'."
The "some other Indian law" in this case would presumably be the LLP Act, but it remains to be seen how lawyers will interpret (embrace?) the law.
Legally India has currently not had any luck accessing the original article directly (linked to from Indian Corporate Law), but will be sure to read it as soon as it is back on-line.
London paper the Evening Standard has run a scare story on legal jobs going to India today, which makes a welcome change on the paper's usual stories on transport chaos and terrorism.
FoxMandal Little's (FML) outsourcing arm in particular, will supposedly be single-handedly responsible for taking away 1,000 UK lawyers' jobs by the end of the year, according to a quick extrapolation done by the Evening Standard on the back of a napkin.
As far as Legally India understands it, FML's outsourcing venture Legal Circle is still one of the smaller operations in the market but that should not put a halt to ambition.
Legal Circle's outsourcing head Soumitro Chatterjee told the Evening Standard that he had met 10 UK firms and added: "All of them are thinking of creating between 50 to 100 seats [jobs]."
Is the paper counting FML's chickens before they've hatched, perhaps? No, 10 times 100 equals 1,000. That'll make a headline.
Most Evening Standard readers are not excited by the prospect, however remote.
"Outsourcing work to India is not good," writes Jan Need from Romford in the on-line comments. "It would probably be a lot easier to do [the work] in London in the first place. The main reason for all this is obvious. £6,000 for a lawyer in Mumbai £70,000+ for a London lawyer. Need I say more?"
Photo by vlima.com